Since Laravel 4.2, it is possible to use external emails providers to send emails in your application: Mailgun and Mandrill. Before that I was using a nice plugin fedeisas/laravel-mail-css-inliner to inline CSS just before sending the email. Thanks to this, my views are very clean and my emails are still displayed properly in the various email clients and webmails. This plugin was taking advantage of SwiftMailer to inline the CSS when sending an email by registering a plugin. Unfortunately, it is not working with external providers because SwiftMailer is not used since an API call is made instead.

Extending some classes to fix this

I really wanted to inline my CSS before sending an email and I wanted a clean way to do this. A workaround that I have figured out is to extend two classes: Illuminate\Mail\MailServiceProvider and Illuminate\Mail\Transport\MailgunTransport.

I’ve created a new file located at app/lib/TeenQuotes/Mail/Transport/MailgunTransport.php. The goal was to edit the message before calling the Mailgun API.

namespace TeenQuotes\Mail\Transport;

use Swift_Transport;
use Swift_Mime_Message;
use GuzzleHttp\Post\PostFile;
use Swift_Events_EventListener;
use TijsVerkoyen\CssToInlineStyles\CssToInlineStyles;

class MailgunTransport extends \Illuminate\Mail\Transport\MailgunTransport {

	/**
	 * {@inheritdoc}
	 */
	public function send(Swift_Mime_Message $message, &$failedRecipients = null)
	{
		$client = $this->getHttpClient();

		// Inline CSS here
		$converter = new CssToInlineStyles();
		$converter->setEncoding($message->getCharset());
		$converter->setUseInlineStylesBlock();
		$converter->setCleanup();

		if ($message->getContentType() === 'text/html' ||
			($message->getContentType() === 'multipart/alternative' && $message->getBody())
		) {
			$converter->setHTML($message->getBody());
			$message->setBody($converter->convert());
		}

		foreach ($message->getChildren() as $part) {
			if (strpos($part->getContentType(), 'text/html') === 0) {
				$converter->setHTML($part->getBody());
				$part->setBody($converter->convert());
			}
		}

		// Call the API
		$client->post($this->url, ['auth' => ['api', $this->key],
			'body' => [
				'to' => $this->getTo($message),
				'message' => new PostFile('message', (string) $message),
			],
		]);
	}
}

Since we have a new MailgunTransport, we need to use our custom MailgunTransport when sending an email. I have created a new file at app/lib/TeenQuotes/Mail/MailServiceProvider.php.

namespace TeenQuotes\Mail;

use TeenQuotes\Mail\Transport\MailgunTransport;

class MailServiceProvider extends \Illuminate\Mail\MailServiceProvider {

	/**
	 * Register the Mailgun Swift Transport instance.
	 *
	 * @param  array  $config
	 * @return void
	 */
	protected function registerMailgunTransport($config)
	{
		$mailgun = $this->app['config']->get('services.mailgun', array());

		$this->app->bindShared('swift.transport', function() use ($mailgun)
		{
			return new MailgunTransport($mailgun['secret'], $mailgun['domain']);
		});
	}
}

Not so much work, I just use my custom MailgunTransport that I have just created.

Replacing the Mail Provider

You need to update providers in app/config/app.php to replace the MailServiceProvider with our custom provider.

	'providers' => array(

		// Some others providers...
		'Illuminate\Log\LogServiceProvider',
		// Comment this 'Illuminate\Mail\MailServiceProvider', 
		// We add our new MailServiceProvider
		'TeenQuotes\Mail\MailServiceProvider',
		// Some more providers...
	),

Updating composer.json

We need some new plugins

	"require": {
		// Your plugins
		"tijsverkoyen/css-to-inline-styles": "1.2.*",
		"guzzlehttp/guzzle": "~4.0"
	},

And we need to update the autoload section to be able to load our custom library

	"autoload": {
		"classmap": [
			"app/commands",
			"app/controllers",
			"app/models",
			"app/database/migrations",
			"app/database/seeds",
			"app/exceptions.php",
			"app/tests/TestCase.php"
		],
		"psr-0": {
			"TeenQuotes": "app/lib"
		}
	},

A simple composer dump-autoload and you will be good! Do not forget to set your API key and your mail domain for Mailgun in app/config/services.php.

If you want to use a different namespace of course you are free!

Yesterday I was looking for a way to do a FULLTEXT select using Laravel. It was not so easy. In this article I’m going to explain how to a FULLTEXT select and to order by this selection.

The migration

If you want to do a FULLTEXT search, you will need a FULLTEXT index on at least one column of your table. Warning: if you are using InnoDB as your table’s engine, you will need MySQL >= 5.6. If you are using MyISAM as your table’s engine, you are good to go for the index but you can’t use foreign keys.

I’m using InnoDB with MySQL 5.6, here is my code for the migration of the table.

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;

class CreateQuotesTable extends Migration {

    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('quotes');

        Schema::create('quotes', function(Blueprint $table) {
            $table->engine = "InnoDB";
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->string('content', 500);
            $table->integer('user_id')->unsigned()->index();
            $table->foreign('user_id')->references('id')->on('users')->onDelete('cascade');
            $table->tinyInteger('approved')->default(0);
            $table->timestamps();
        });

        // Here we create the FULLTEXT index
        DB::statement('ALTER TABLE quotes ADD FULLTEXT search(content)');
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        // Drop the index before dropping the table
        Schema::table('quotes', function($table) {
            $table->dropIndex('search');
        });
        Schema::drop('quotes');
    }

}

Nothing uncommon, note that you will have to use a DB::statement('ALTER TABLE quotes ADD FULLTEXT search(content)') to create the index.

Searching using the FULLTEXT index

Here it comes the fun part. Now that we have your index, let’s begin to use it. I want to get quotes based on a search on their content. I want pertinent results so I’ll advantage of the index.

My code is the following:

/**
 * @brief Function used to search for quotes using the FULLTEXT index on content
 *
 * @param  string $search Our search query
 * @return Collection Collection of Quote
 */
public static function searchQuotes($search)
{
    return Quote::
    select('id', 'content', 'user_id', 'approved', 'created_at', 'updated_at', DB::raw("MATCH(content) AGAINST(?) AS `rank`"))
    // $search will NOT be bind here
    // it will be bind when calling setBindings
    ->whereRaw("MATCH(content) AGAINST(?)", array($search))
    // I want to keep only published quotes
    ->where('approved', '=', 1)
    // Order by the rank column we got with our FULLTEXT index
    ->orderBy('rank', 'DESC')
    // Bind variables here
    // We really need to bind ALL variables here
    // question marks will be replaced in the query
    ->setBindings([$search, $search, 1])
    ->get();
}

I haven’t found a convenient way to select all columns from my table plus an additional one: the rank given by the FULLTEXT search. The tricky part here is really the binding. You need to bind all variables at the end of your query to make it work.

I’m not using the FULLTEXT search in BOOLEAN MODE here. If you need to do so, take a look at the official documentation: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-boolean.html. You will only need to add two strings to make it work.

The problem

This is a common problem: you have entities in a category, you want to display them by pages because you have a lot of entities and you don’t want to have entities from page 1 in your page 2.

If you are using the ORDER BY RAND() function from MySQL, you will have a problem. MySQL splits up the data into pages of X posts each (paginates) and fails to include a new set of X posts on page 2 and so forth. In other words, because it is listing things in a random order, it just goes out and gets another X random posts. As a result, you will have some repeated posts instead of a new set of X random posts on page 2, etc.

The solution

Fortunately, there is a solution for this problem. You will be able to “remember” which random 10 posts were included on page 1, and then have a new set of 10 posts to put on pages 2, 3, etc. until all posts are displayed.

The MySQL RAND() function accepts a seed as an optional argument. Using a seed, it will return the same randomized result set each time. For example, if you want your posts to be random ordered, paginated with no repetition, you can write a query like this: SELECT * FROM posts ORDER BY RAND(42) to select posts.

If you do not want to have the same results for every user viewing the list, do not give an arbitrary value to the RAND function: generate a random number, store it in session and pass it to the MySQL RAND function when selecting posts.

In this article I will show how simple is it to code in PHP a 2-step authentication for your application thanks to the Google Authenticator application for your smartphone.

Requirements

You will need Composer for your computer and the Google Authenticator application on your smartphone.

Coding

Let’s start! Create an empty directory, and put this simple composer file inside.
Open a terminal in the directory you just created and run
Now you have the famous vendor directory with the package that we need. You can view it on GitHub here: https://github.com/mauroveron/laravel-google-authenticator.

Let’s create our main file. We are not going to code a entire connection system, I will just show you how you can code a 2-step authentication system. The user will have to download the Google Authenticator application, scan a barcode and then he will have a 6 digits code every 30 seconds from the application. You will ask for this code if he has previously entered his password successfully.

Put this file in the same directory.

If you want to test this code, run this command from your terminal:

Open your browser, go to http://localhost:8080, scan the barcode from the Google Authenticator application and refresh the page. The current code (given by the website) should follow what is written on your phone. You should have something like this in your Google Authenticator app.

Conclusion

And… That’s it! You know how to generate a secret key for a user, the barcode associated with it and you have a function to check if the user has entered the right code. Of course you will have some work to do if you want to implement it into your website: you will have to explain to your users how to install the app, how to scan the barcode, to save their secret key in your users table and add a step to your login process.

But it’s not so difficult 🙂